A gun confiscation finally goes into effect and police are going door-to-door. Your home is next — what do you do?

I wouldn’t be at home. I’d be at work, going door-to-door.

Knock Knock Knock

Good morning, ma’am. I’m Sergeant Harding with the Sheriff’s Office. Sorry to disturb you. As I’m sure you’ve heard, today is gun confiscation day. You wouldn’t happen to have any guns here would you?

No? They fell in the lake? Tragic. There seems to be a lot of that going around.

Hey! While I’m here, you wouldn’t happen to have any child porn or illegal drugs in the house? Maybe the dismembered corpse of someone you murdered? A sex slave chained up in the basement, maybe? Would you mind if we checked?

No, ma’am, we have no warrants. Just out going door to door for gun confiscation day.

You don’t want us to search? Well, no worries, ma’am. We all still have that right, at least. Here’s my business card. Some federal agents may be by to double check my work. Please show them this and tell them I was already here. Also, if one of your guns should happen to turn up, please don’t shoot the federal agents.

That’s about how it would go, so long as the 4th amendment wasn’t abolished along with the 2nd. If you abolished the 4th as well, then I guess I’d be too busy at the riots to go door-to-door, unless you also abolished the 1st, in which case I’d be even busier at the riots.

By “busy” I mean “busy as a participant” in either case.

Sometimes I disagree with the courts and the lawmakers, but I’m humble enough to go ahead and enforce their laws anyway, because that’s what it means to live in a society with rule of law — sometimes my opinion gets overruled. Completely ignore the 2nd so blatantly that we have “door to door gun confiscation day?” Nope. There’s no gray area there. Fire me if you want to, but I won’t stand for it.

Except I wouldn’t get fired, because nobody except the elected Sheriff of my county can fire me, and he, as well as every cop I know, would be taking pretty much the same approach as me.

A few years ago, when Illinois law prohibited pretty much anyone but cops from carrying a gun, the Supreme Court declared that law unconstitutional. Sheriffs and prosecutors all over Illinois (outside the Chicago area of course) instantly made press releases and issued policy notices that possession of a firearm by a felon was still illegal under another statute, and using a gun in a crime was still illegal under various statutes, but that according to the US Supreme Court, Illinois currently had no law which was Constitutional and which prohibited law abiding people from carrying whatever guns they wanted to carry. Since our oaths were to the Constitution, we would be treating that unconstitutional law as though it didn’t exist.

That should tell you something about how cops outside of big cities would handle such a sci-fi scenario.

By the way, do you remember the wave of violence and destruction which swept over Illinois during the months it took lawmakers to craft a new gun law which didn’t violate the Constitution like the old one had? Those months where so many Sheriffs and prosecutors had publicly announced that Illinois no longer had any law prohibiting law abiding people from carrying guns?

Seriously? You don’t remember all the murders, the duels and shootouts in the middle of previously-peaceful streets and all the road rage incidents which instantly resulted in a hail of gunfire?

No?

That’s because it didn’t happen. A few counties, like Cook County, announced that they would go on enforcing the law which had been declared unconstitutional, as though the Constitution didn’t matter, but much of the state went without major gun laws for months, and nothing happened. What’s that tell you about how vital gun laws are to our safety?

If anything as asinine as “door to door gun confiscation day” ever happened, it would mostly be a non-event. Maybe I’d get some mandatory overtime going door to door and chatting with neighbors who had all suffered tragic boating accidents within the last few weeks.